Are we still at the point of pretending that ID isn't creationism in disguise? Really? Phillip E Johnson is often though of as the father of ID though the ideas are rather older. Here are some quotes of his to help the discussion along

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The Intelligent Design movement starts with the recognition that "In the beginning was the Word," and "In the beginning God created." Establishing that point isn't enough, but it is absolutely essential to the rest of the gospel message.Forword to Creation, Evolution, & Modern Science (2000)

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So the question is: "How to win?" That's when I began to develop what you now see full-fledged in the "wedge" strategy: "Stick with the most important thing" — the mechanism and the building up of information. Get the Bible and the Book of Genesis out of the debate because you do not want to raise the so-called Bible-science dichotomy. Phrase the argument in such a way that you can get it heard in the secular academy and in a way that tends to unify the religious dissenters. That means concentrating on, "Do you need a Creator to do the creating, or can nature do it on its own?" and refusing to get sidetracked onto other issues, which people are always trying to do.Touchstone Magazine interview (June 2002)

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Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit so that we can get the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools.American Family Radio (10 January 2003)

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I also don’t think that there is really a theory of intelligent design at the present time to propose as a comparable alternative to the Darwinian theory, which is, whatever errors it might contain, a fully worked out scheme. There is no intelligent design theory that’s comparable. Working out a positive theory is the job of the scientific people that we have affiliated with the movement. Some of them are quite convinced that it’s doable, but that’s for them to prove…No product is ready for competition in the educational world.Berkley Science Review (Spring 2006). Retrieved on 2008-11-23.

Right then, anyone like to comment on these interesting quotes? They are all taken from here.

Logged

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such that its falshood would be more miraculous than the facts it endeavours to establish. (David Hume)

Why not? You just state the answer is no, without giving any reasons. Are we simply supposed to take your word for it?

Abiogenesis 'by chance' is no longer considered a plausible possibility by the scientific community. I figured anyone participating in this discussion knew that. If I recall correctly, there is/was a foundation of some sort who was offerring a $1,000,000 prize for anyone who could produce a plausible scenario for abiogenesis and the last time I checked they had not received even a single eligible entry. Wow.

If you are going to claim that chance is plausible then the burden to demonstrate it is on you because I cannot find anything. Best wishes.

“Considering the way the prebiotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its existence.”Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory In Crisis

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Quote from: BibleStudent

Can some type of chemical attraction account for the origin of life? No

Again, why not? Why just the blatant answer "no" with no reasoning to back it up?

This is another argument I hear but, as far as I am concerned, it is just another 'abiogenesis by chance' proposition. My answer to this is same as above. I've done my research and can find no widely supported hypothesis for a chance or random chemical attraction or reaction abiogenesis event.

Again, if I am incorrect and you feel I may have simply failed to locate a possible hypothesis, then please provide me with some guidance.

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Quote from: BibleStudent

Is it possible that natural selection played a role in the origin of life? No

You need to support statements like this. It takes more than just you saying that something is not possible or that it could not have accounted for something else.

In this specific case, you are correct, but it is because natural selection pretty much requires an existing biosphere. Before the origin of life, Earth could have had no biosphere and thus no natural selection was realistically possible.

Correct.

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Quote from: BibleStudent

Is it possible that there is perhaps a natural law or a natural phenomenon that we just haven’t discovered yet? Not likely. Natural laws are usually discovered AFTER a thought experiment is conceived and not as the unexpected result of experimentation….and, at present, there are no suspected natural laws that may help to explain a naturalistic origin of life.

This disregards the fact that we already know that biological organisms are governed by chemical reactions. Indeed, life would not be possible without those chemical reactions. Therefore, we already know of a natural phenomenon that can account for the origin of life, chemical reactions, and this whole point is moot. Or perhaps you meant "chemical reactions" above, instead of chemical attractions? Regardless, your declaration that it is not possible says nothing because you do not support it at all.[ /quote]

Do you really need me to start linking you to various sources so you can research this for yourself? You ain't going to like me doing that very much because I've been accumulating sources for 4-5 years now and you will be spending an enormous amount of time reviewing and critquing all of them.

Quote from: BibleStudent

The options for a naturalistic origin are virtually non-existent at this point and instead of the scientific community coming together to examine the design inference, we find instead that intelligent design is ostracized because of a dogmatic ‘methodological naturalism’ born out of some poorly conceived demarcation in an attempt to support a worldview rather than embrace the inquisitive and exploratory nature of science.

The only thing "virtually non-existent" right now is your reasoning to justify excluding chance and chemical reactions from being involved with the origins of life, and thus claiming that "intelligent design" is the only possible explanation left.

You can take my above answers and drop them right here.

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However, intelligent design as an explanation for the origins of life is lethally flawed. If the intelligent designer was a biological organism, then it must have come about by some means, except that you have arbitrarily disallowed the only means we know of to explain it and are violating Occam's razor on top of that (since you are unnecessarily increasing the complexity of the explanation for no good reason). So the only option left is a non-biological organism of some kind.

Yes, I agree with you on the part I bolded (<-- is "bolded" a word?).

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Yet we've never found evidence of any non-biological organisms to begin with. Without that evidence, there's no good reason to infer a non-biological designer of any kind. Furthermore, we have found no solid evidence of design in any biological organism.

You are completely missing the point of ID which is simply positioning another possible explanation. ID does not have to identify the non-biological 'intelligence'.....it simply produces a logical reason to consider a non-biological origin.

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Therefore, intelligent design cannot adequately explain the origins of life on Earth as it stands. As you have clearly demonstrated here, it is based on pure inference, that a designer must have existed because the natural means for how life could have originated were arbitrarily excluded from consideration. And that does not fly.

No. What I am asserting is that, taken with other arguments for the existence of God, ID becomes a more plausible explanation.

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Quote from: BibleStudent

Despite the fact that IDT makes use of the scientific method, we have the non-theist community (both scientists and non-scientists) creating ad hoc rules and criteria in an attempt to keep the ID kids from getting to play in the ToE’s backyard because the ToE kids don’t want their worldview coming under attack.

The scientific method requires experimentation in order to back up a hypothesis. Where are all the experiments that were done to establish that intelligent design has validity? If you cannot point to any, claiming that it makes use of the scientific method is simply wrong.

Interesting! So a prize has not yet been won? So what? Research into all sorts of biological phenomenon are being carried out but, I suspect, abiogenesis is probably low on the list of priorities - it is unlikely to yield more that information on our origins. Whilst such information would be rather good and would put out of business, more important things need to be done.

No doubt some day we will have the answer - people are working on the problem, which is more than can be said of the ID crowd who, really don't do any work at all and expect people to take them seriously!

Logged

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such that its falshood would be more miraculous than the facts it endeavours to establish. (David Hume)

- an interesting study, not convinced that life is common on earthlike (goldilocks zone) planets until we have absolute proof of the next planet with life - so far, if I am correct, we have been on 1 moon and 2 planets out of, .....quadrillions?

- Creation by an Intelligent Power outside our sphere of investigation. This possibility is best investigated by considering what the alternatives are. We have done that. Certainly one searching for truth cannot arbitrarily exclude this possibility.

Bible student, I believe you have reached an impasse. I am not saying we, because, as the above quote asks of truth, and because I am an agnostic atheist, I remain very interested in findings of ID or abiogenesis. It seems possibly you are not as interested in abiogenesis, as many scientists still seem to be. Stay tuned. (I want to insert an undecided smiley here, but that function doesn't work anymore)

- an interesting study, not convinced that life is common on earthlike (goldilocks zone) planets until we have absolute proof of the next planet with life - so far, if I am correct, we have been on 1 moon and 2 planets out of, .....quadrillions?

Two moons, as far as I know - ours was the first, and Saturn's moon, Titan, was the second. The latter proved to have an environment rich in organic compounds and nitrogen, and a liquid-water upper mantle. Pretty likely that life could survive there, actually. Even some micribial life transported from Earth.

Abiogenesis 'by chance' is no longer considered a plausible possibility by the scientific community. I figured anyone participating in this discussion knew that. If I recall correctly, there is/was a foundation of some sort who was offerring a $1,000,000 prize for anyone who could produce a plausible scenario for abiogenesis and the last time I checked they had not received even a single eligible entry. Wow.

If you are going to claim that chance is plausible then the burden to demonstrate it is on you because I cannot find anything. Best wishes.

This sounds an awful lot like the arguments posted on this page: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.html. Basically, that abiogenesis is so improbable that it could not have happened by 'chance'. In short, it depends on people not understanding how chance works to begin with.

For example, the page I linked above gives an example of a particular self-replicating peptide forming by chance of 4.29 x 1040, which while highly improbable, is far less improbable than a specific end result of a 40-move chess game (known as the Shannon numberWiki), of which there are about 10120 total. In short, the chances of getting a particular end result in chess are absurdly low, yet it happens all the time. So you cannot arbitrarily rule out abiogenesis by chance merely because it is improbable.

Quote from: BibleStudent

This is another argument I hear but, as far as I am concerned, it is just another 'abiogenesis by chance' proposition. My answer to this is same as above. I've done my research and can find no widely supported hypothesis for a chance or random chemical attraction or reaction abiogenesis event.

Again, if I am incorrect and you feel I may have simply failed to locate a possible hypothesis, then please provide me with some guidance.

The mere fact that you decry abiogenesis caused by chemical reactions as "just another abiogenesis by chance proposition" shows that you don't really understand the science of chemistry. Chemical reactions do not happen at random; in fact, they are exceedingly non-random. As long as you have the components needed for a chemical reaction present, it will occur. So to be blunt, the research you performed is effectively worthless because you assumed, probably without thinking about it, that random chance was required for natural abiogenesis to have happened, and you probably ran across a bunch of those arguments by creationists to the effect that "such and such couldn't have happened because it was too unlikely" and were swayed because of the really big numbers involved. However, the law of large numbersWiki applies; the larger your sample size, the more normalized the results become. Billions of billions of billions of organic molecules, all doing their own thing for millions of years, make it much more likely that the chemical reactions necessary for life will happen. So you can't discount chemical reactions either.

Quote from: BibleStudent

Do you really need me to start linking you to various sources so you can research this for yourself? You ain't going to like me doing that very much because I've been accumulating sources for 4-5 years now and you will be spending an enormous amount of time reviewing and critquing all of them.

If those sources led you to make the bad arguments you made above, that took me less than an hour to debunk, it raises the question of just how reliable they are.

Quote from: BibleStudent

You can take my above answers and drop them right here.

Given that your answers above are simply wrong, as I showed (excepting the one about natural selection), you cannot simply cut and paste. Indeed, the fact that you think you can lends a lot of credence to the idea that you're basing your opposition to the parts of evolutionary theory you disagree with (not to mention abiogenesis) on a flawed argument from probability - specifically, that something that seems improbable enough didn't happen. It simply doesn't matter how improbable you think it is, for two reasons. First, you can't accurately measure the probability of an event that already happened unless you can accurately describe all the variables that went into it. Second, probability calculations are tricky enough that unless you have a good understanding of how probability mechanics work, you're very likely to be way off.

Here is a good, easy to understand example of this. Basically, how many people would you need in a room before you reached a 50% probability of having two people with matching birthdays? I would like you to try to answer this on your own.

Quote from: BibleStudent

Yes, I agree with you on the part I bolded (<-- is "bolded" a word?).

Yes, bolded is a word - it is the simple past and past participle of the verb "to bold".

Quote from: BibleStudent

You are completely missing the point of ID which is simply positioning another possible explanation. ID does not have to identify the non-biological 'intelligence'.....it simply produces a logical reason to consider a non-biological origin.

First off, intelligent design does in fact have to identify possible designers; it cannot simply say that something logically appears to have been designed but not even attempt to identify what it is. If nothing else, because logic is no guarantee of being correct. That's why science requires evidence instead of simply using logic, and why we can't rely on thought experiments to figure out how the universe works.

Second, intelligent design must be able to answer the objections of critics. By simply saying that something looks designed but having no way to tell us what to look for in the way of a designer or methods of design, it makes it impossible to answer critics, which is the worst possible result for anything that seeks to consider itself science. In order for something to be scientific, it must be testable and falsifiable, and intelligent design fails at both.

Quote from: BibleStudent

No. What I am asserting is that, taken with other arguments for the existence of God, ID becomes a more plausible explanation.

If this is all you're after, why are you wasting our time? This does not come across as an honest effort at discovery, it comes across as an attempt to make a pet belief seem more likely while avoiding things that might disprove it. To paraphrase something I heard, those who are not willing to risk being wrong about something can never ever show themselves to be right.

The so-called "testable predictions" listed on that page are not really testable - it is impossible to verify anything about intelligent design using them - and they are not predictions in any case. They are simply statements of things that intelligent design advocates interpret in such and such a way to mean intelligent design, which is pretty much useless for the purposes of establishing whether intelligent design has any validity.

Furthermore, the arguments made on that page are just plain bad. For example, they declare that things (such as the bacterial flagellum) are irreducibly complex without any evidence to support it, which is worse since it's been more than adequately shown that the bacterial flagellum is not irreducibly complex. Repeating an argument that has been falsified won't make it any less false. They also refer to the Cambrian explosion as support for "biological novelty appearing suddenly and without precursors", but the fact is that we don't yet know why it happened. There are a number of competing hypotheses for it, and arguing that intelligent designers were responsible is one of the least-supported ones out there. The other two points mentioned are no better; pointing to intelligent design as the reason for different organisms converging on similar organs and hidden functionality in DNA simply isn't well-supported by existing evidence. This is because intelligent design simply assumes that there must have been a designer (unlike evolutionary theory, which takes no position on the origins of life) and then attempts to interpret things to support this initial assumption. It simply doesn't work all that well, and ends up putting the cart before the horse, because it must have an intelligent designer even if the evidence doesn't support one - thus resulting in positing something 'supernatural' as a designer because there's simply no other way to explain it. And then making up ad hoc explanations to get around the inevitable problems that crop up as a result.

The thing (well one of many things) that bugs me about the ID "science" is that they never do any original research or discover anything new. They rely on real science to do all the heavy lifting, then attack the real research with legalistic and philosophical arguments, not science.

If they really thought that ID was science, they would get out there and spend the years doing the actual field work or actual lab work. They would be using the many religious colleges and universities as centers for ID investigations, and train their students in ID science. They would present their speculations at conferences and let other scientists tear into them. They would have to put their ideas on the line like real scientists, and risk showing to all the world what they got wrong and what they got right.

They would then be able to show how ID accurately predicts the locations of previously unknown fossils, helps police solve crimes in a new, better way, or yields different information about human origins--you know, all that useful stuff that real science does. They would be able to show that applying ID yields better cures for diseases than "Darwinistic" evolutionary biology, or that using ID finds petroleum and useful minerals better than using "Darwinistic" geology.

But they can't do any of that, and the leaders know they can't. ID is not science. It is religion and religion has no universally convincing evidence.[1] So they don't waste their time and money trying to do real science. Instead, they blame mainstream scientific institutions for not giving them money for their magical pseudo-research.[2]They spend lots of money to produce slick arguments that persuade and reassure non-scientist believers. They pressure textbook companies to include their stuff, and drag public schools through court cases.

A few generations ago on page 3 of this of this mammoth discussion, BS gave us some important statements concerning ID - something I asked him to produce to show ID was science and not pseudo-science / creationism. I asked him to show us what was predicted by ID - thinking that if they had something of a proper prediction for which people would have to search for (like locating the positron, predicted in 1935 or the Higgs predicted in 1964). I was not surprised when he produced

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Predictions of Design (Hypothesis):(1) Natural structures will be found that contain many parts arranged in intricate patterns that perform a specific function (e.g. complex and specified information).(2) Forms containing large amounts of novel information will appear in the fossil record suddenly and without similar precursors.(3) Convergence will occur routinely. That is, genes and other functional parts will be re-used in different and unrelated organisms.(4) Much so-called "junk DNA" will turn out to perform valuable functions.http://www.evolutionnews.org

The lazy ID crowd just used other people's hard work and said their ideas fitted something that they already knew - or maybe they found something and worked the ideas backwards... Who knows - but they don't do science from that list any way!

Now, we are on page 24 as I type. I hope we can finish this off soon as I am convinced we are going round in circles with this discussion.

Logged

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such that its falshood would be more miraculous than the facts it endeavours to establish. (David Hume)

This sounds an awful lot like the arguments posted on this page: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.html. Basically, that abiogenesis is so improbable that it could not have happened by 'chance'. In short, it depends on people not understanding how chance works to begin with.

For example, the page I linked above gives an example of a particular self-replicating peptide forming by chance of 4.29 x 1040, which while highly improbable, is far less improbable than a specific end result of a 40-move chess game (known as the Shannon numberWiki), of which there are about 10120 total. In short, the chances of getting a particular end result in chess are absurdly low, yet it happens all the time. So you cannot arbitrarily rule out abiogenesis by chance merely because it is improbable.

While the probability argument has its place in a discussion regarding the origin of life, I am not asserting that here. Rather, what I am saying is that there are insurmountable problems with a naturalistic development of the pathways necessary for an abiogenesis event to occur. I presented a question earlier in this thread asking what came first; RNA, DNA, or a protein. The lack of responses demonstrates the validity of my claim here.

The mere fact that you decry abiogenesis caused by chemical reactions as "just another abiogenesis by chance proposition" shows that you don't really understand the science of chemistry. Chemical reactions do not happen at random; in fact, they are exceedingly non-random. As long as you have the components needed for a chemical reaction present, it will occur. So to be blunt, the research you performed is effectively worthless because you assumed, probably without thinking about it, that random chance was required for natural abiogenesis to have happened, and you probably ran across a bunch of those arguments by creationists to the effect that "such and such couldn't have happened because it was too unlikely" and were swayed because of the really big numbers involved.

I erred by not being a little more specific as to what I was getting at so your comments are justified and accurate. I apologize. What I was trying to convey is that the chemical bonding forces dictated by the laws of physics and chemistry contain no instructions to form the necessary sequence of amino acids so that the type of life sustaining protein folding occurs. So, where did the specified sequencing come from? It is unexplainable.

Here is a good, easy to understand example of this. Basically, how many people would you need in a room before you reached a 50% probability of having two people with matching birthdays? I would like you to try to answer this on your own.

The birthday problem has been around for awhile. I don’t remember exactly but I think it was somewhere around 20 people needed for a 50% probability???? I know this problem is intended to demonstrate that the number of people is much much less than most people assume.

Again, I am not arguing probabilities. Maybe some other time in another thread. Suffice it to say that some of the probability arguments are legitimate and others are not.

First off, intelligent design does in fact have to identify possible designers; it cannot simply say that something logically appears to have been designed but not even attempt to identify what it is. If nothing else, because logic is no guarantee of being correct. That's why science requires evidence instead of simply using logic, and why we can't rely on thought experiments to figure out how the universe works.

You are incorrect. If the design inference can demonstrate that the information contained in a biological structure has functionality, complexity, and specificity, then it has produced evidence for the existence of an intelligence as the source. It is not proof of an intelligence but it is evidential of one. Asserting that the identification of the intelligent source is necessary to validate the evidence is a straw man.

Second, intelligent design must be able to answer the objections of critics. By simply saying that something looks designed but having no way to tell us what to look for in the way of a designer or methods of design, it makes it impossible to answer critics, which is the worst possible result for anything that seeks to consider itself science. In order for something to be scientific, it must be testable and falsifiable, and intelligent design fails at both.

Second, intelligent design abiogenesis must be able to answer the objections of critics. By simply saying that something looksdesigned began but having no way to tell us what to look for in the way of a designer method or methods of design pathway, it makes it impossible to answer critics, which is the worst possible result for anything that seeks to consider itself science. In order for something to be scientific, it must be testable and falsifiable, and intelligent design abiogenesis fails at both.

If this is all you're after, why are you wasting our time? This does not come across as an honest effort at discovery, it comes across as an attempt to make a pet belief seem more likely while avoiding things that might disprove it. To paraphrase something I heard, those who are not willing to risk being wrong about something can never ever show themselves to be right.

Disprove it? What scientific evidence do you have that could disprove it? You have repeatedly stated that science does not offer ‘proof’ so if you are switching gears on me now and saying that science can disprove something then I would like to see your ‘proof.’

Furthermore, the arguments made on that page are just plain bad. For example, they declare that things (such as the bacterial flagellum) are irreducibly complex without any evidence to support it, which is worse since it's been more than adequately shown that the bacterial flagellum is not irreducibly complex. Repeating an argument that has been falsified won't make it any less false.

This is a substantially incorrect statement. The irreducible complexity of the flagellum has never been debunked. If you are buying into the refuted argument that the type III secretory system nullified the flagellum as an ‘irreducibly complex’ system then I suggest you need to do some additional research:

“finding a subsystem of a functional system that performs some other function is hardly an argument for the original system evolving from that other system. One might just as well say that because the motor of a motorcycle can be used as a blender, therefore the motor evolved into the motorcycle. Perhaps, but not without intelligent design. Indeed, multipart, tightly integrated functional systems almost invariably contain multipart subsystems that serve some different function. At best the TTSS represents one possible step in the indirect Darwinian evolution of the bacterial flagellum. But that still wouldn't constitute a solution to the evolution of the bacterial flagellum. What's needed is a complete evolutionary path and not merely a possible oasis along the way. To claim otherwise is like saying we can travel by foot from Los Angeles to Tokyo because we've discovered the Hawaiian Islands. Evolutionary biology needs to do better than that.”http://www.designinference.com/documents/2003.02.Miller_Response.htm

ID does not have anything to offer science, because ID assumes it already knows the answer ("a being that does design") and has loaded the question accordingly ("who designed everything?"). That is like saying leprechauns must exist because we can observe that there are rainbows and gold, so we now need to focus on finding leprechauns. ID is religion and magic, not science.

When I was taking earth science back in high school, the books said they did not yet have enough evidence to say that plate tectonics and continental drift were fact. Scientists predicted that someday they would be able to measure the amount of continental movement and even watch it in real time. Then we would be able to say that the theories had enough evidence to call them facts.

In the many years since, we have been able to use GPS to measure the exact amount and direction of continental movement, and to use underwater cameras to watch as new seafloor is being made. These pieces of evidence also support what geologists and paleontologists say about the age of the earth.[1]

Same thing has happened, hundreds of times in the past century in the case of evolutionary theory alone. A prediction is made based on observations--for example, that traits are passed to offspring from parents, so, someday a mechanism will be found for organisms to pass traits to offspring. Evidence is then gathered based on the predictions--and scientists found the mechanism: DNA.

If no DNA-type mechanism had been found, or if scientists had found instead that there was a mechanism that transmitted traits from offspring to parents, or if every time they tried to do experiments on evolution, the lab exploded, things would be different.

What would have to happen to cast doubt on the "science" of ID? Well, it has already happened. It's called the theory of evolution, and so far, all the predictions made based on it have been supported by subsequent discoveries.

It seems absurd that there are folks calling evolution into question when people use the applications all the time, entire new fields of science--like genetics-- have arisen because of it, and new discoveries are being made in these areas everyday. Scientists were looking, and found what the theory predicted. Plus different fields of science agree and can incorporate the new information. Applications of the theory help people in everyday life. These are undeniable facts.

ID has none of this, and has nothing to offer. Because it is based on religious magic, not science.

A few generations ago on page 3 of this of this mammoth discussion, BS gave us some important statements concerning ID - something I asked him to produce to show ID was science and not pseudo-science / creationism. I asked him to show us what was predicted by ID - thinking that if they had something of a proper prediction for which people would have to search for (like locating the positron, predicted in 1935 or the Higgs predicted in 1964). I was not surprised when he produced

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Predictions of Design (Hypothesis):(1) Natural structures will be found that contain many parts arranged in intricate patterns that perform a specific function (e.g. complex and specified information).(2) Forms containing large amounts of novel information will appear in the fossil record suddenly and without similar precursors.(3) Convergence will occur routinely. That is, genes and other functional parts will be re-used in different and unrelated organisms.(4) Much so-called "junk DNA" will turn out to perform valuable functions.http://www.evolutionnews.org

The lazy ID crowd just used other people's hard work and said their ideas fitted something that they already knew - or maybe they found something and worked the ideas backwards... Who knows - but they don't do science from that list any way!

Now, we are on page 24 as I type. I hope we can finish this off soon as I am convinced we are going round in circles with this discussion.

I would appreciate it if you would provide an honest answer to this question: If we were not arguing whether IDT was scientific, would you agree that the design inference is valid based on the functional, complex, and specified 'information' observed in the strcutures deemed to be 'irreducibly complex?'

I genuinely believe that many people fail to consider this important question and instead go on the attack to disprove IDT as a scientific theory.

And, by the way, you responded with a "so what?" earlier in the thread to a reference I made about a 1,000,000 prize offered for a plausible hypothesis as respects abiogenesis. The fact the no one has been able to collect the prize is compelling so I am not buying your "so what?"

ID does not have anything to offer science, because ID assumes it already knows the answer ("a being that does design") and has loaded the question accordingly ("who designed everything?"). That is like saying leprechauns must exist because we can observe that there are rainbows and gold, so we now need to focus on finding leprechauns. ID is religion and magic, not science.

When I was taking earth science back in high school, the books said they did not yet have enough evidence to say that plate tectonics and continental drift were fact. Scientists predicted that someday they would be able to measure the amount of continental movement and even watch it in real time. Then we would be able to say that the theories had enough evidence to call them facts.

In the many years since, we have been able to use GPS to measure the exact amount and direction of continental movement, and to use underwater cameras to watch as new seafloor is being made. These pieces of evidence also support what geologists and paleontologists say about the age of the earth.[1]

Same thing has happened, hundreds of times in the past century in the case of evolutionary theory alone. A prediction is made based on observations--for example, that traits are passed to offspring from parents, so, someday a mechanism will be found for organisms to pass traits to offspring. Evidence is then gathered based on the predictions--and scientists found the mechanism: DNA.

If no DNA-type mechanism had been found, or if scientists had found instead that there was a mechanism that transmitted traits from offspring to parents, or if every time they tried to do experiments on evolution, the lab exploded, things would be different.

What would have to happen to cast doubt on the "science" of ID? Well, it has already happened. It's called the theory of evolution, and so far, all the predictions made based on it have been supported by subsequent discoveries.

It seems absurd that there are folks calling evolution into question when people use the applications all the time, entire new fields of science--like genetics-- have arisen because of it, and new discoveries are being made in these areas everyday. Scientists were looking, and found what the theory predicted. Plus different fields of science agree and can incorporate the new information. Applications of the theory help people in everyday life. These are undeniable facts.

ID has none of this, and has nothing to offer. Because it is based on religious magic, not science.

If earth scientists had said, instead, let's see if the god Atlas moves the continents, they would have gotten nowhere.

Consider the following:

"There is a great deal about abiogenesis that is unknown, but investigating the unknown is what science is for. Speculation is part of the process. As long as the speculations can be tested, they are scientific." http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB050.html

This is a particularly good explanation as to what science is all about and emphasizes a key point I have been trying to highlight in this thread.

And, I would like to ask you this question as well and I would appreciate it if you would provide an honest answer: If we were not arguing whether IDT was scientific, would you agree that the design inference is valid based on the functional, complex, and specified 'information' observed in the strcutures deemed to be 'irreducibly complex?'

- an interesting study, not convinced that life is common on earthlike (goldilocks zone) planets until we have absolute proof of the next planet with life - so far, if I am correct, we have been on 1 moon and 2 planets out of, .....quadrillions?

Bible student, I believe you have reached an impasse. I am not saying we, because, as the above quote asks of truth, and because I am an agnostic atheist, I remain very interested in findings of ID or abiogenesis. It seems possibly you are not as interested in abiogenesis, as many scientists still seem to be. Stay tuned. (I want to insert an undecided smiley here, but that function doesn't work anymore)

You are incorect in somehow inferring that I am not as interested in abiogenesis as many scientists are. It is, in fact, my fascination with the idea that has led me to realize that the likelihood of it occurring is about as close to zero as you can get.

You are incorect in somehow inferring that I am not as interested in abiogenesis as many scientists are. It is, in fact, my fascination with the idea that has led me to realize that the likelihood of it occurring is about as close to zero as you can get.

Abiogenesis may or may not have happened, but do keep in mind that your opinion will not be the deciding factor.

Logged

It isn't true that non-existent gods can't do anything. For instance, they were able to make me into an atheist.

While the probability argument has its place in a discussion regarding the origin of life, I am not asserting that here. Rather, what I am saying is that there are insurmountable problems with a naturalistic development of the pathways necessary for an abiogenesis event to occur. I presented a question earlier in this thread asking what came first; RNA, DNA, or a protein. The lack of responses demonstrates the validity of my claim here.

First off, you asserted to schnozzola that "likelihood of (abiogenesis) occurring is about as close to zero as you can get." Sure sounds like an argument from probability to me, even though you are almost certainly not qualified to evaluate the probability of abiogenesis. Second, you have so far not given any real details on or evidence relating to those "insurmountable problems"; you have merely asserted that they exist, which is meaningless. Repeating a claim does not make it any more true. Third, a lack of scientific knowledge about something, such as your "which came first" question, doesn't demonstrate the validity of any counter-claims you or anyone else might make. Indeed, this is a basic precept of science - if we don't know something, we keep looking until we find out, instead of making unsupported and unsupportable assumptions about it.

Quote from: BibleStudent

I erred by not being a little more specific as to what I was getting at so your comments are justified and accurate. I apologize. What I was trying to convey is that the chemical bonding forces dictated by the laws of physics and chemistry contain no instructions to form the necessary sequence of amino acids so that the type of life sustaining protein folding occurs. So, where did the specified sequencing come from? It is unexplainable.

The "lack of instructions" you refer to is totally meaningless when it comes to chemistry. No chemical reaction requires instructions in order to react in a given way, whether it's simple or complex. In fact, your statement about the "lack of instructions" demonstrates an assumption on your part, that biology is too 'complex' to happen without preexisting instructions. That unless something else provides the "specified sequencing", it cannot happen. Your inability to explain it proves nothing except that you cannot explain it. It certainly does not prove that it could not have happened as you keep suggesting.

Quote from: BibleStudent

The birthday problem has been around for awhile. I don’t remember exactly but I think it was somewhere around 20 people needed for a 50% probability???? I know this problem is intended to demonstrate that the number of people is much much less than most people assume.

Again, I am not arguing probabilities. Maybe some other time in another thread. Suffice it to say that some of the probability arguments are legitimate and others are not.

The actual point of the birthday problem is to demonstrate that most people don't understand how probability works well enough to make accurate calculations about it. I mean, if something as relatively straightforward as the birthday problem consistently leads people who don't know better to come up with a wrong answer, then imagine how much more difficult trying to calculate the probability of something like abiogenesis would be, especially since we don't even have all of its parameters worked out yet. The point being, any declaration of its probability is almost certainly wrong, and in a lot of cases, laughably wrong.

Quote from: BibleStudent

You are incorrect. If the design inference can demonstrate that the information contained in a biological structure has functionality, complexity, and specificity, then it has produced evidence for the existence of an intelligence as the source. It is not proof of an intelligence but it is evidential of one. Asserting that the identification of the intelligent source is necessary to validate the evidence is a straw man.

You are the one who is incorrect, I'm afraid. Neither functionality, complexity, nor specificity serve as evidence for the existence of an intelligence as their source. Indeed, as we know from our own experience designing things, it's entirely possible to design things that are not functional, not complex, and not specific. Furthermore, we know that things in nature can be functional (like how carbon dioxide and other gases trap heat in an atmosphere), complex (like climate), and specific (like complex chemical compounds). So the inference that the presence of those things represents design somehow is wrong. Because of that, asserting that some intelligence is the source of biological life without providing evidence to support that such an intelligence actually exists is not tenable.

Quote from: BibleStudent

Second, intelligent design abiogenesis must be able to answer the objections of critics. By simply saying that something looksdesigned began but having no way to tell us what to look for in the way of a designer method or methods of design pathway, it makes it impossible to answer critics, which is the worst possible result for anything that seeks to consider itself science. In order for something to be scientific, it must be testable and falsifiable, and intelligent design abiogenesis fails at both.

I am not amused, especially since I have never argued that abiogenesis is a certainty like you have with design. The fact is that science does not claim to know just exactly how abiogenesis might have worked, and thus various people are working on it and coming up with new hypotheses to test, because we haven't yet worked it out. What have intelligent design advocates done? Made bad argument after bad argument after bad argument, all the while ignoring the necessity for actual evidence, if not outright writing it off through sophistry. Intelligent design isn't even a hypothesis, because it doesn't make predictions that can be falsified. Especially you, BibleStudent, who argues that your god is the "intelligent designer" and thus that you do not have to provide evidence because he used some unidentifiable and unexplainable divine power to create life.

Given the choice between scientists who at least try to figure out how to explain things and how to eventually do them ourselves, and people like you who assert that we shouldn't bother because a god did it and we shouldn't hope to be able to do it ourselves someday, I'll choose the scientists every time. At least they're making the effort, and although many of them end up being wrong, it's through getting things wrong that we figure out how to do them right eventually. And we find out things, often by accident, in the process of getting all those things wrong too.

Quote from: BibleStudent

Disprove it? What scientific evidence do you have that could disprove it? You have repeatedly stated that science does not offer ‘proof’ so if you are switching gears on me now and saying that science can disprove something then I would like to see your ‘proof.’

You're the one who keeps talking about proving and disproving things. I was describing your behavior as it comes across to me, which you pretty much confirmed just now by eagerly jumping all over my use of the word 'disproved' as it pertained to your own behavior.

Quote from: BibleStudent

This is a substantially incorrect statement. The irreducible complexity of the flagellum has never been debunked. If you are buying into the refuted argument that the type III secretory system nullified the flagellum as an ‘irreducibly complex’ system then I suggest you need to do some additional research:

The whole paragraph that follows is nothing but an attempt to claim that because bacteria used the various structures that went into a flagellum in other ways, that the flagellum is still somehow "irreducibly complex". It continues to make the unwarranted and unverifiable assumption that things like a bacterial flagellum are analogous to machines designed and made by humans, demonstrated by the bad analogy about how a motorcycle motor being able to power a blender doesn't prove that the motor evolved into a motorcycle.

Indeed, the fallacious nature of the argument is illustrated by the fact that we know and can easily observe that motorcycles are designed and constructed. We have master blueprints for them, we have methodologies to determine the best methods for constructing them, and we have the factories that we use to mass-produce them. Yet we do not have the master blueprints for a bacterial flagellum, we do not have the methodologies used to determine the best methods for constructing them, and we don't even have the factories which would mass-produce them.

Intelligent design advocates would presumably argue that DNA is the blueprint and the organism itself is the factory. However, DNA is not a master blueprint; it is a working blueprint that gets changed by mutations (usually bad or neutral, occasionally good). Indeed, mutations happen so frequently that it isn't surprising at all that something like the type III secretory system could have had something added on to it which didn't help it become a better secretory system but didn't affect it badly enough to keep it from surviving, and then further mutations gave the new system different functionality instead (that of a flagellum). Incidentally, another reason why the attempted refutation you posted doesn't work; not only did it start with a bad assumption and then follow it with a bad analogy, but it didn't even answer the actual point made by Miller when he showed that various structures that went into the flagellum had actual functionality of their own. Instead, it stated that because there was no complete evolutionary path provided, that it didn't actually mean anything.

But that's false. You don't need to provide a complete evolutionary path to falsify the so-called "irreducible complexity" of the bacterial flagellum, because irreducible complexity depends on the assumption that a complex enough biological organ will not work unless all of its pieces are in place. So when you can show that the individual pieces have their own functions and can work on their own, it contradicts the whole idea of requiring those pieces to be pre-assembled into that biological organ, provided the organism can survive without that organ.

Quote from: BibleStudent

There are additional refutations available if you are interested.

I hope that wasn't your best 'refutation', because I wasn't impressed at all.

By the way, I don't have any problems if you want to speculate about intelligent design. There's nothing wrong with that. But in order to go anywhere from there, you need evidence to support it. Not statements that if something has functionality, complexity, and specificity, it somehow supports the "design inference" even though it doesn't, and not 'predictions' that were already known before they were ever stated.

Sorry, BS but this question of predictions is pretty vital to making ID science, I posted above the prediction you gave us but, as mentioned above, these are all stuff that we knew already. It isn't any good messing about are arguing about it - a good hypothesis must make predictions and it must be possible to test them.

So far as I can see, the only prediction that has been made for ID is that there is a designer. Really, until that designer is identified and tied in to the designing that prediction has not been met and the whole idea can't be taken seriously. I find it hard to think that, if this is really science, this has not yet been done.

Are there any other predictions that have been made that we haven't heard of? Now would be a great time to produce them.

Logged

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such that its falshood would be more miraculous than the facts it endeavours to establish. (David Hume)

“finding a subsystem of a functional system that performs some other function is hardly an argument for the original system evolving from that other system. One might just as well say that because the motor of a motorcycle can be used as a blender, therefore the motor evolved into the motorcycle. Perhaps, but not without intelligent design. Indeed, multipart, tightly integrated functional systems almost invariably contain multipart subsystems that serve some different function. At best the TTSS represents one possible step in the indirect Darwinian evolution of the bacterial flagellum. But that still wouldn't constitute a solution to the evolution of the bacterial flagellum. What's needed is a complete evolutionary path and not merely a possible oasis along the way. To claim otherwise is like saying we can travel by foot from Los Angeles to Tokyo because we've discovered the Hawaiian Islands. Evolutionary biology needs to do better than that.”http://www.designinference.com/documents/2003.02.Miller_Response.htm

That loud bang you just heard, people, is the "whoop" of displaced air as goalposts are rapidly moved

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It's one of the reasons I'm an atheist today. I decided to take my religion seriously, and that's when it started to fall apart for me.~jdawg70

I would appreciate it if you would provide an honest answer to this question: If we were not arguing whether IDT was scientific, would you agree that the design inference is valid based on the functional, complex, and specified 'information' observed in the strcutures deemed to be 'irreducibly complex?'

No, I do not, and neither does the scientific community. Please address my review of Dembski's "CSI" here which I revealed "CSI" to be pseudoscience.

I genuinely believe that many people fail to consider this important question and instead go on the attack to disprove IDT as a scientific theory.

The problem is, the methods used by ID "scientists" are incompetent and/or dishonest. You seem to hold this false belief that people who attack ID, do so because they simply don't like it (perhaps because it conflicts with a worldview). What you perceive as attacks are merely challenges to a pseudoscience.

If you want ID to be considered science then tell the ID "scientists" to stop using incompetent and/or dishonest methods.

And, by the way, you responded with a "so what?" earlier in the thread to a reference I made about a 1,000,000 prize offered for a plausible hypothesis as respects abiogenesis. The fact the no one has been able to collect the prize is compelling so I am not buying your "so what?"

First off, you asserted to schnozzola that "likelihood of (abiogenesis) occurring is about as close to zero as you can get." Sure sounds like an argument from probability to me,

It is not an argument from probability. As I stated earlier, I am not arguing probabilities and I explained why I am claiming that abiogenesis could not have occurred. Stick to the issue instead of trying to create diversions.

Second, you have so far not given any real details on or evidence relating to those "insurmountable problems"; you have merely asserted that they exist, which is meaningless. Repeating a claim does not make it any more true.

Which came first; RNA, DNA, or a protein? This is one of the many insurmountable problems.

Third, a lack of scientific knowledge about something, such as your "which came first" question, doesn't demonstrate the validity of any counter-claims you or anyone else might make. Indeed, this is a basic precept of science - if we don't know something, we keep looking until we find out, instead of making unsupported and unsupportable assumptions about it.

Is abiogenesis falsifiable? If so, please explain how. Is abiogenesis even based on science or is it mere speculation?

The "lack of instructions" you refer to is totally meaningless when it comes to chemistry. No chemical reaction requires instructions in order to react in a given way, whether it's simple or complex. In fact, your statement about the "lack of instructions" demonstrates an assumption on your part, that biology is too 'complex' to happen without preexisting instructions. That unless something else provides the "specified sequencing", it cannot happen. Your inability to explain it proves nothing except that you cannot explain it. It certainly does not prove that it could not have happened as you keep suggesting.

Bingo !!

There are no known natural laws of chemistry or physics which could originally direct or determine the ordering of the sequence that amino acids assemble in a protein. Neither do amino acids somehow direct the ordering of sequence. So, how did this occur? There are no known natural laws to explain this phenomenon. Thousands of experiments later and still nothing? 'Evolution diddit.'

You are the one who is incorrect, I'm afraid. Neither functionality, complexity, nor specificity serve as evidence for the existence of an intelligence as their source. Indeed, as we know from our own experience designing things, it's entirely possible to design things that are not functional, not complex, and not specific. Furthermore, we know that things in nature can be functional (like how carbon dioxide and other gases trap heat in an atmosphere), complex (like climate), and specific (like complex chemical compounds). So the inference that the presence of those things represents design somehow is wrong. Because of that, asserting that some intelligence is the source of biological life without providing evidence to support that such an intelligence actually exists is not tenable.

The part I bolded is key here. Your own words concede that the designed things you referenced were designed by an intelligence. The simple fact that some things are not complex, specified, or functional is irrelevant. They were still designed. Designed things do not design themselves.

Your other examples cite the functionality in one thing, complexity in another, and specific in yet another. Intelligent Design identifies structures and systems that contain all three with no known pathway for the information to have been created.

, especially since I have never argued that abiogenesis is a certainty like you have with design.

That is irrelevant. If you can argue that my re-statement of your comments using the substituted words is erroneous, then you are at least offering a refutation. My modified re-statement of your words is either accurate or it isn’t.

The fact is that science does not claim to know just exactly how abiogenesis might have worked, and thus various people are working on it and coming up with new hypotheses to test, because we haven't yet worked it out.

What you fail to understand is that there is no possible way to ever know what the variables (ie. atmosphere, temperature, the makeup of the pre-biotic soup, etc) were. A good example of what I am talking about is the Miller-Urey experiment. It was fired upon by many in the scientific community (regardless of worldview) for this very reason and any other similar experiments will likely produce the same level of contentiousness. Trying to find evidence for abiogenesis is not science.

What I am hearing from you is that ‘evolution diddit’…..and an ‘evolution-of-the-gaps’ argument.

What have intelligent design advocates done? Made bad argument after bad argument after bad argument, all the while ignoring the necessity for actual evidence, if not outright writing it off through sophistry. Intelligent design isn't even a hypothesis, because it doesn't make predictions that can be falsified. Especially you, BibleStudent, who argues that your god is the "intelligent designer" and thus that you do not have to provide evidence because he used some unidentifiable and unexplainable divine power to create life.

IDT does make predictions, it can be tested, it can be falsified, and it studies nature. It is apparent that no amount of evidence to the contrary will convince you of this. The problem is, you see it as a threat to your personal worldview and you will protect that worldview even if it means being willfully dishonest.

Given the choice between scientists who at least try to figure out how to explain things and how to eventually do them ourselves, and people like you who assert that we shouldn't bother because a god did it and we shouldn't hope to be able to do it ourselves someday, I'll choose the scientists every time. At least they're making the effort, and although many of them end up being wrong, it's through getting things wrong that we figure out how to do them right eventually. And we find out things, often by accident, in the process of getting all those things wrong too.

When you can adequately explain how the application of science as respects abiogenesis differs from IDT then you might have a leg to stand on. Your LUCA and your 'first living organism' are as elusive as the God you demand ID to produce.

You're the one who keeps talking about proving and disproving things. I was describing your behavior as it comes across to me, which you pretty much confirmed just now by eagerly jumping all over my use of the word 'disproved' as it pertained to your own behavior.

Oh. So you had a valid reason for making use of the word “disproven.” Got it.

Intelligent design advocates would presumably argue that DNA is the blueprint and the organism itself is the factory. However, DNA is not a master blueprint; it is a working blueprint that gets changed by mutations (usually bad or neutral, occasionally good). Indeed, mutations happen so frequently that it isn't surprising at all that something like the type III secretory system could have had something added on to it which didn't help it become a better secretory system but didn't affect it badly enough to keep it from surviving, and then further mutations gave the new system different functionality instead (that of a flagellum).

You must have missed the part about how current molecular evidence suggests that the TTSS evolved from the flagellum.

I hope that wasn't your best 'refutation', because I wasn't impressed at all.

Well, then I guess either you can refute the molecular evidence or you can provide evidence of a pathway that explains the emergence of complexity from simplicity. If you can do neither then you weren’t impressed because you didn’t understand what you were reading.

The "lack of instructions" you refer to is totally meaningless when it comes to chemistry. No chemical reaction requires instructions in order to react in a given way, whether it's simple or complex. In fact, your statement about the "lack of instructions" demonstrates an assumption on your part, that biology is too 'complex' to happen without preexisting instructions. That unless something else provides the "specified sequencing", it cannot happen. Your inability to explain it proves nothing except that you cannot explain it. It certainly does not prove that it could not have happened as you keep suggesting.

Bingo !!

There are no known natural laws of chemistry or physics which could originally direct or determine the ordering of the sequence that amino acids assemble in a protein. Neither do amino acids somehow direct the ordering of sequence. So, how did this occur? There are no known natural laws to explain this phenomenon. Thousands of experiments later and still nothing? 'Evolution diddit.'

Read what jaimehlers wrote again. Your reply indicates you didn't understand what he wrote. You also might want to research and learn about chemistry.

You also seem to have a pretty basic gross misconception about what "Laws" in science mean. "Laws" are not some directive for nature to follow, instead "Laws" are just a description of a consistent behavior in nature.

« Last Edit: February 23, 2014, 08:42:36 PM by SevenPatch »

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"Shut him up! We have a lot invested in this ride - SHUT HIM UP! Look at my furrows of worry! Look at my big bank account, and my family! This just HAS to be real!" - Bill Hicks

I would appreciate it if you would provide an honest answer to this question: If we were not arguing whether IDT was scientific, would you agree that the design inference is valid based on the functional, complex, and specified 'information' observed in the strcutures deemed to be 'irreducibly complex?'

No, I do not, and neither does the scientific community. Please address my review of Dembski's "CSI" here which I revealed "CSI" to be pseudoscience.

You indicated in your review that "Dembski defines Information as “the actualization of one possibility to the exclusion of others”. This definition appears to be more in line with “an event having occurred” within probability theory, and not information"

Since this seems to be the basis of your argument, I would simply suggest that you do some additional homework on information theory because it is based on probability theory.

I genuinely believe that many people fail to consider this important question and instead go on the attack to disprove IDT as a scientific theory.

The problem is, the methods used by ID "scientists" are incompetent and/or dishonest. You seem to hold this false belief that people who attack ID, do so because they simply don't like it (perhaps because it conflicts with a worldview). What you perceive as attacks are merely challenges to a pseudoscience.

Since when is it pseudoscience to perform research and testing on observations we make in nature? Be careful how you answer this because it may come back to haunt you.

And, by the way, you responded with a "so what?" earlier in the thread to a reference I made about a 1,000,000 prize offered for a plausible hypothesis as respects abiogenesis. The fact the no one has been able to collect the prize is compelling so I am not buying your "so what?"

The James Randi Educational Foundation has a one million dollar prize for anyone who can prove the paranormal or supernatural (which includes gods) exist. This prize has been up for grabs since 1996.

I'm in the "so what" crowd though as the lack of a prize being won doesn't prove any thing.

Science takes time though and abiogenesis is a very young hypothesis which is still gathering information and observations.

I really like the "it's a very young hypothesis" defense. I hear this frequently and not just regarding abiogenesis.

Question is: how do you know that the study of abiogenesis is "very young?"

Basically, what you are conceding is that there is no worthwhile evidence and that science only knows part of what it needs to know....but how could you possibly know this? Unless God or an alien appears, abiogenesis is unfalsifiable because you could make the "we just haven't figured it out yet' argument until the sun burns up....and....since you seemingly aren't entertaining the possibility of God's appearance, I guess you're stuck with ET to falsify abiogenesis.

The "lack of instructions" you refer to is totally meaningless when it comes to chemistry. No chemical reaction requires instructions in order to react in a given way, whether it's simple or complex. In fact, your statement about the "lack of instructions" demonstrates an assumption on your part, that biology is too 'complex' to happen without preexisting instructions. That unless something else provides the "specified sequencing", it cannot happen. Your inability to explain it proves nothing except that you cannot explain it. It certainly does not prove that it could not have happened as you keep suggesting.

Bingo !!

There are no known natural laws of chemistry or physics which could originally direct or determine the ordering of the sequence that amino acids assemble in a protein. Neither do amino acids somehow direct the ordering of sequence. So, how did this occur? There are no known natural laws to explain this phenomenon. Thousands of experiments later and still nothing? 'Evolution diddit.'

Read what jaimehlers wrote again. Your reply indicates you didn't understand what he wrote. You also might want to research and learn about chemistry.

You also seem to have a pretty basic gross misconception about what "Laws" in science mean. "Laws" are not some directive for nature to follow, instead "Laws" are just a description of a consistent behavior in nature.

Please, by all means, clarify what jaimehlers said that I didn't understand.

Bible Student, The chemistry involved in life is very common. No matter how you view the scientific study of evolution, scientists are not so much trying to prove ID wrong, as, having moved past ID, trying to understand how these natural combinations led to life. I am afraid your view will get less and less of an acknowledgement as science moves on.

Let's start at the beginning - I suppose you believe god invented water - H20 - one of the main ingredients of our type of life. I believe water is formed because of the chemical attraction, and stability of the 2 very common elements involved - I do not believe there is a deity involved. Our life systems are the way they are because there is water, there is not water because we need it.

So, if you look at a basic protein, histadine, this is how it looks -You can see - mostly carbon ( the lines are carbon-carbon chains - strong as steel ), nitrogen, and hydrogen, with the water molecule on the end. Even the HN is due to atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen. This forms in nature - God does not do it, no intelligent design is necessary - it forms on its own, and because it does, our type of life, all that we consider life, started in very basic steps from these basic chemistries like this, and, very slowly. If you think of a plant's roots, and the way charged elements like calcium and magnesium are attracted to the negatively charged root hairs, this is such a common part of how nature works - and no deity is involved.

Our type of life is the way it is because of these chemistries - these natural chemical reactions. In the opinion of scientific research, with the addition of the time involved for these chemistries to combine in the myriad of ways they have combined, this is responsible for life.

Above I said your view will get less and less acknowledgement. If I am wrong, and the idea that parts of science aren't so necessary [ like the idea that global warming - (and it is a temperature warming do to the amount of CO2 -another chemical that god is not helping to combine) - is wrong] the lower and lower funding for all the advances needed for science will hurt us all - and that is my fear if fundamentalist Christian views win the day.

No, I do not, and neither does the scientific community. Please address my review of Dembski's "CSI" here which I revealed "CSI" to be pseudoscience.

You indicated in your review that "Dembski defines Information as “the actualization of one possibility to the exclusion of others”. This definition appears to be more in line with “an event having occurred” within probability theory, and not information"

Since this seems to be the basis of your argument,

It's not the basis at all actually. I really didn't care if that was how Dembski was going to proceed, I just thought it was odd. The basis of my argument is that Dembski abandons his own definitions and never shows why his definitions are meaningful or functional.

You might want to read your own homework as the PDF you linked doesn't support your claim that information theory is based on probability theory. Actually, both are branches of applied mathematics and statistics. This is a red herring anyway as even if information theory was based on probability theory, it wouldn't affect my review.

Perhaps I am mistaken and you would like to quote where your link supports your claim.

The problem is, the methods used by ID "scientists" are incompetent and/or dishonest. You seem to hold this false belief that people who attack ID, do so because they simply don't like it (perhaps because it conflicts with a worldview). What you perceive as attacks are merely challenges to a pseudoscience.

Since when is it pseudoscience to perform research and testing on observations we make in nature? Be careful how you answer this because it may come back to haunt you.

Straw-man. I never said it was "pseudoscience to perform research and testing on observations we make in nature".

What you can't seem to wrap your head around is that ID does not perform research and testing on observations we make in nature.

The James Randi Educational Foundation has a one million dollar prize for anyone who can prove the paranormal or supernatural (which includes gods) exist. This prize has been up for grabs since 1996.

I'm in the "so what" crowd though as the lack of a prize being won doesn't prove any thing.

Science takes time though and abiogenesis is a very young hypothesis which is still gathering information and observations.

I really like the "it's a very young hypothesis" defense. I hear this frequently and not just regarding abiogenesis.

Question is: how do you know that the study of abiogenesis is "very young?"

How do I know? It's still a hypothesis for one and there are many different hypotheses within the hypothesis. Technology has limited making observations and testing up until the last 20 years or so. Technological advances are still making it possible to test predictions in efforts to verify or falsify the various hypotheses. Additionally, there are still unknowns which scientists are still researching and trying to figure out.

Basically, what you are conceding is that there is no worthwhile evidence and that science only knows part of what it needs to know....but how could you possibly know this? Unless God or an alien appears, abiogenesis is unfalsifiable because you could make the "we just haven't figured it out yet' argument until the sun burns up....and....since you seemingly aren't entertaining the possibility of God's appearance, I guess you're stuck with ET to falsify abiogenesis.

I make no such concession. Actually, all of the various abiogenesis hypotheses are falsifiable. "We just haven't figured it out yet" doesn't prove or disprove a hypothesis. Progress of hypothesis usually help it stay relevant. No progress doesn't mean a hypothesis is falsified, it just kind of collects dust until a breakthrough might make it relevant again (dark matter for example).

I have no reason not to entertain the possibility of god's appearance, but even if a god(s) appeared that wouldn't falsify abiogenesis. ET wouldn't falsify abiogenesis either. I don't think you understand how a hypothesis is falsified.

A hypothesis is falsified if some part or all of it is found to be incorrect, and a quality hypothesis offers various ways to falsify it usually by making predictions which could turn out to be incorrect. Predictions could be either some thing that should be expected to be found upon testing or observation or should not be expected to be found upon testing or observation.

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"Shut him up! We have a lot invested in this ride - SHUT HIM UP! Look at my furrows of worry! Look at my big bank account, and my family! This just HAS to be real!" - Bill Hicks

Read what jaimehlers wrote again. Your reply indicates you didn't understand what he wrote. You also might want to research and learn about chemistry.

You also seem to have a pretty basic gross misconception about what "Laws" in science mean. "Laws" are not some directive for nature to follow, instead "Laws" are just a description of a consistent behavior in nature.

Please, by all means, clarify what jaimehlers said that I didn't understand.

I kind of did in my second paragraph that you replied to. I did add it in an edit so perhaps you just missed it. Although you probably should have noticed it in the reply, so I'm more inclined to assume you didn't even bother to read my second paragraph.

Given your history of not even bothering to read the full text of what you're replying to much less attempt to comprehend what you're reading, why should I reply to you?

Additionally, given your gross ignorance on a multitude of subjects I wouldn't even know where to begin to clarify. I'm not trying to be mean, I just don't know what else to say to you to help you understand that your education level is, shall we say, lacking in the relevant topics of this discussion. I expect, you'll dismiss this criticism by assuming it is based on some personal flaw of my own (ie I see you as a threat or I don't understand ID). That is not the case, I am begging you not to dismiss this criticism and actually start reading material on chemistry, physics, mathematics and biology. Perhaps check online to see if there are any free or cheap classes you can take in your area.

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"Shut him up! We have a lot invested in this ride - SHUT HIM UP! Look at my furrows of worry! Look at my big bank account, and my family! This just HAS to be real!" - Bill Hicks

I kind of did in my second paragraph that you replied to. I did add it in an edit so perhaps you just missed it. Although you probably should have noticed it in the reply, so I'm more inclined to assume you didn't even bother to read my second paragraph.

Now you are just being dishonest. Your second paragraph does nothing to explain what you allege I misunderstood in jaimehlers post. Instead, you lectured me on what the laws in science are but you didn’t point specifically to how that impacted my comments.

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Given your history of not even bothering to read the full text of what you're replying to much less attempt to comprehend what you're reading, why should I reply to you?

See, you’re being dishonest again. You don’t want to reply because you shot your mouth off and when I invited you to elaborate, you realized that you couldn’t because you don’t understand what jaimehlers and I are even discussing in the post you referenced.

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Additionally, given your gross ignorance on a multitude of subjects I wouldn't even know where to begin to clarify.

Well, given your PhD in all known subjects, why don’t you just go ahead and give it a try.

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I'm not trying to be mean, I just don't know what else to say to you to help you understand that your education level is, shall we say, lacking in the relevant topics of this discussion.

I don’t think you’re being mean. I think you’re just trying to create a diversion in the hopes you can slink out of the corner you backed yourself into. I don’t think you realize just how telling your language is right now. I’ve been around this block before, chief.

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I expect, you'll dismiss this criticism by assuming it is based on some personal flaw of my own (ie I see you as a threat or I don't understand ID). That is not the case, I am begging you not to dismiss this criticism and actually start reading material on chemistry, physics, mathematics and biology. Perhaps check online to see if there are any free or cheap classes you can take in your area.

You’re begging me? I appreciate your concern but, trust me, I know when I am really wrong about something because the vultures swarm and I get pounded relentlessly.

It is not an argument from probability. As I stated earlier, I am not arguing probabilities and I explained why I am claiming that abiogenesis could not have occurred. Stick to the issue instead of trying to create diversions.

And this claim of yours amounts to nothing more than an argument from incredulity fallacy. "I just can't see how it could have happened naturally. So therefore it must be impossible. Therefore, Yahweh (magic) did it." FAIL. You simply have no means for determining what is impossible. Your predecessors said the same thing. "That light coming down from the clouds can't be explained any other way. Praise Zeus!!!"

Which came first; RNA, DNA, or a protein? This is one of the many insurmountable problems.

This is the cornerstone of your gullibility.

"Which came first; the lightening or the thunder? It's insurmountable!! See? Zeus did it."

A mere ASSERTION based in your incredulity is a logical fallacy. Again you have no viable means for demonstrating how you know something is "insurmountable". You just keep SAYING it over and over like a fricking mantra, and each time you do it doesn't make it any less fallacious.

There are no known natural laws of chemistry or physics which could originally direct or determine the ordering of the sequence that amino acids assemble in a protein. Neither do amino acids somehow direct the ordering of sequence. So, how did this occur? There are no known natural laws to explain this phenomenon. Thousands of experiments later and still nothing? 'Evolution diddit.'

So many fallacies, so little time. 1. If it were true that there was no known natural "law" that could explain the hypothesis of abiogenesis (and you are using that term incorrectly) then YOU would have to claim ignorance on the subject, too, and be an agnostic. But you're not, are you? You move beyond science, positing mmmmmagic!, while trying to pretend it's science. NOPE! 2. By putting words in our mouths, stating that we are saying "Evolution didit" are you now admitting that your argument "God didit" is equally as fallacious?? As William Lane Craig once stated, "Two fallacious argument added together do not make a sound argument." Stop pretending that your argument from ignorance is valid while somehow thinking others are not (even though it's a strawman b/c we haven't made that argument). 3. Evolution DOES NOT deal with the origin of life. It deals with living systems as they are already found in nature. So you are going off into rabbit trails by making these assertions. How did life begin? I DON'T KNOW! And I don't pretend to, like you. That is the difference. When you don't know something (which for some reason you feel you MUST know based in your precommitment to your assumed theology) you just make shit up instead of admitting ignorance.

Where did you get this "thousands of experiments" claim? Have you actually researched these "thousands"? Please post all these thousands of experiments you think have taken place for abiogensis.

The part I bolded is key here. Your own words concede that the designed things you referenced were designed by an intelligence. The simple fact that some things are not complex, specified, or functional is irrelevant. They were still designed. Designed things do not design themselves.

Your other examples cite the functionality in one thing, complexity in another, and specific in yet another. Intelligent Design identifies structures and systems that contain all three with no known pathway for the information to have been created.

LOL. I love it. You say, "No known pathway" and then a second later claim your alleged known pathway "Godmagic didit". HA! Such hypocrisy doesn't fly in science. Secondly, the human capacity to design things does not tell us anything about living systems. In case you hadn't noticed, motorcycles do not reproduce!! So any argument on these lines that brings up human design is a false analogy (another logical fallacy). Sorry. You have yet to demonstrate any teleology behind biological systems (i.e. - any "design", intention, or "specificity"). Specificity requires a mind, and you haven't demonstrated there is specificity in biological systems. It's just a mere assertion of yours (and Dembski and Behe and Johnson and Meyer, etc).

As a counterexample to one of your claims here though, some human designed things do have the capacity to create. Computer programmers have created programs that can replicate themselves. If inventors invent a machine that can duplicate itself will you claim God didit?

What you fail to understand is that there is no possible way to ever know what the variables (ie. atmosphere, temperature, the makeup of the pre-biotic soup, etc) were. A good example of what I am talking about is the Miller-Urey experiment. It was fired upon by many in the scientific community (regardless of worldview) for this very reason and any other similar experiments will likely produce the same level of contentiousness. Trying to find evidence for abiogenesis is not science.

What I am hearing from you is that ‘evolution diddit’…..and an ‘evolution-of-the-gaps’ argument.

That's b/c you are hearing what you want to hear instead of what is actually being stated. "There is no possible way..." Wait, I hear the argument from ignorance train-a-comin!! Are gap arguments OK to use? Are they rational? If not, then stop using them. "There's no known pathway. Therefore, magicGod is more plausible" is irrational.

When you can adequately explain how the application of science as respects abiogenesis differs from IDT then you might have a leg to stand on. Your LUCA and your 'first living organism' are as elusive as the God you demand ID to produce.

Abiogenesis is a field of investigation which houses many competing models and hypotheses (some of which have shown that, at least in principle, the origin of the most basic self replication is possible given the right conditions, i.e. - not logically impossible). ID is NOT like this. It posits one unfalsifiable explanation which has no evidence, experiment, or explanatory power - only a mere assertion of "some intelligence out there must have done it b/c we can't think of any other way it could have happened." As in the Dover trial, ID is not science. It is creationism dressed up and doesn't belong in classrooms.

The layout, approach, and the argument you used follows the same sequence. You even used the same titles for each of the sections.

Next time, you might just want to indicate that you found someone else’s approach useful and decided to use it as template for your own work. There is nothing wrong with doing this. I haven’t checked to see if you used any of the actual wording from the article but you need to be a little more transparent about your sources.